A tag on my Yogi teabag says “What can you appreciate in this moment?” It’s always fun to wonder what each tag will say.
Of course with this one I received the gift of another well…the Well of Appreciation.
It would have been easy to simply answer the “prompt” and move on with my day. Oh, I appreciate that the house is cool before the record heat sets in. Done. I answered about “the moment.”
However, what I love about going to the well and dipping over and over again is the surprise of what each dipping brings.
Sometimes it is lists. Sometimes it is a question. Sometimes it is curiosity that takes me into further exploration. Sometimes it is memories. Or a nudge. Most of the time it is a bit of all of those.
Often, when I go to the well with my journal it becomes offers up a stream of consciousness. One thing follows the next without stopping to decide or plan or organize. It absolutely frames the rest of my day. When I stay beyond the quick moment, how can it not?
Here is my stream of consciousness until I had to be on a Zoom call. I can always go back and continue. It could become a chapter in a book, a song, a children’s book, a painting (if I could paint). Most of all, each well becomes a presence. It somehow knows how to follow me through my day.
So…early… on the back porch, cat on the table watching the morning bird life…here is what I wrote.
I appreciate in this moment the changing sky and wisps of blue showing through in the triangle of sky between the pines, that triangle a place that often offers me peace.
I appreciate Bill in his 90s, who lives next door but is at his childhood home in Maine and I appreciate that I miss him and can keep an eye on the house from my porch.
The voices of the blue jays and crows and little birds I cannot see, all greeting the day and wishing for more puddles…for Doc’s daily morning saunter to all rooms in the house checking to see if anything changed in the night and then settling by me on the table…his rituals that are as much rituals as my rituals.
The first couple of hours without my hearing aids in, sounds of morning traffic muted and I dance in appreciating the silence for which I do not know the cause even while I miss my old natural hearing
I mull the difference and also the relationship between appreciation and gratefulness and want to think about those more. So many wells complement each other, which gives me even more appreciation for them.
I think of how with material things we often speak of something appreciating in value or depreciating…the minute one drives a new car off the lot it has already depreciated in value…while other material items appreciate far beyond what one ever paid…and some don’t go either way. This chair is neither appreciating nor depreciating in value as I appreciate its comfortableness.
What about relationships? Do they appreciate and depreciate? I don’t really know the answer to that yet. We never speak of them that way.
Does age appreciate in this era when “ageism” is such a hot topic? I choose to say yes even when it feels like no. And the body, too? I don’t want to buy into the depreciation story. My body is still a miracle even with ups and downs and has an incredible system in it that no one could possibly have invented.
Was the word “appreciate” even around a few centuries ago? I want to look that up. If not, who invented it and how was it known and shown even before the word?
How does it get expressed beyond a quickness? What does it mean to deeply appreciate? What does it feel like inside to be mindful of the word when we hear it, act on it and say it? What does it feel like to offer it and accept it?
How can I take a moment of dislike or sadness or so many other emotions and let appreciation in some way weave itself in? Let it maybe save me in a way?
Time for Zoom. I am setting an intention to keep this word present today and appreciate the word appreciation.